All Is True

We'd seen this at the cinema and i knew at once that it was the type of film that would go down well if we screened it at our club: the presence of Judi Dench in the cast generally means a good film and also a decent sizes audience.

Seeing it again made me appreciate it even more, particularly Ben Elton's wonderfully autumnal screenplay. It also went don well with our members.

All Is True

UK 2018          97 minutes

Director:          Kenneth Branagh

Starring:            Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) at the Movies for Grownups Awards
• Nominations for Best Film, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Ian McKellen) at the Movies for Grownups Awards

“Ben Elton has written a sweet-natured, melancholy film about the retirement years of someone he’s lately been turning into his specialist subject: William Shakespeare. The great poet is played here with genial sympathy by the film’s director, Kenneth Branagh, sporting a pretty outrageous false nose. Judi Dench is his wife Anne Hathaway, wearied into resilient impassivity by grief, the unfairness of life and an awful secret. Ian McKellen has a colossal, emphatically wigged cameo as the ageing Earl of Southampton.”

Peter Bradshaw

Following the fire that began during a performance of his play Henry VIII and destroyed the Globe Theatre William Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) returns to his family home Stratford upon Avon. His wife Anne (Judi Dench) is still haunted by the death of her only son 17 years earlier, and as Shakespeare struggles to rebuild his broken family relationships and search for inner peace he has to confront the dark heart of his family’s secrets and lies.

The title of the film is the alternate title of Shakespeare’s late play Henry VIII, but the story is most definitely not true: a few key elements of the film reflect the historical record, but others are mere conjecture or even just made up. Prior to writing this screenplay Ben Elton has used the life of Shakespeare as the basis for three series of his witty situation comedy Upstart Crow which included an episode covering the death of Shakespeare’s son. This film is set many years after that death but nonetheless the event drives the action of the plot and there is a distinctly elegiac and autumnal feeling to the way that both William and Anne respond to it and resolve their issues after William’s return to the family home.

Judi Dench was a mentor to Kenneth Branagh at the start of his stage career in the 1980s when she directed him in a number of productions, and in recent years she has performed in several plays that he has produced with his own company. They also appeared together on stage in a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus where Branagh played the title role and Dench played his mother. In the cinema Dench had a cameo role in Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), they both appeared in My Week with Marilyn (2011) and more recently Dench appeared in Branagh’s film of Murder on the Orient Express, in which Branagh also starred as Hercule Poirot.

Meanwhile despite his prominent position on the poster Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton only appears for a short sequence when he visits Shakespeare at home, although he gives a performance that almost steals the film. When McKellen recently brought his one man show to the Watermill he talked about the making of the film and how strange it was to work with Branagh as both co-star and director: seeing Branagh in costume and make-up in the director’s chair made him feel that he was being directed by Shakespeare himself.

Ben Elton made his name as a stand-up comedian in the 1980s but subsequently has become better known as a writer. In addition to writing for successful TV comedies such as The Young Ones, Blackadder and, more recently, Upstart Crow he has also written 15 novels and several musicals including We Will Rock You and Love Never Dies.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Stan & Ollie

We screened Stan & Ollie towards the end of last year. The film looks back to the early 1950s and to a world that has long since disappeared, but as the days go by it seems that the world we lived in in 2019 has also now disappeared - hopefully not for good.

I missed the film at the cinema, was delighted to see it finally at our film club and was not in the least disappointed by it.

Stan &Ollie

UK 2018          97 minutes

Director:          Jon S Baird

Starring:            Steve Coogan, John C Reilly, Shirley Henderson, Nina Arianda and Rufus Jones

“Like the comedy greats to whom this winningly warm film pays tribute, Jon S Baird’s affectionate drama balances humour and pathos, laughter and tears. Set in Laurel and Hardy’s twilight years, it’s more melancholy love story than slapstick showbiz reminiscence. … Superb headline performances from Steve Coogan and John C Reilly are matched by equally sparkling supporting turns from Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson as Stan and Ollie’s combative wives, providing what an astute promoter dubs ‘two double acts for the price of one!’”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) (John C Reilly)
• Three BAFTA nominations including Outstanding British Film and Best Actor (Steve Coogan)
• Seven British Independent Film Award nominations including Best Actor (Steve Coogan) and Best Supporting Actress (Nina Arianda)
• A further three wins and eight nominations

In 1953 Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C Reilly) undertake a gruelling music hall tour around the UK and Ireland as they struggle to raise finance to make another film. As word of their visit spreads their audiences grow and they begin performing in more prestigious venues, including two weeks at the Lyceum Theatre in London, although ill health meant that the tour was the last time that the pair worked together.

Laurel and Hardy made their first film together in 1921, although both were already well established as film actors in their own right, and over the succeeding 30 years made 106 films together. Their films and the characters they portrayed have remained popular with both the general public and serious film fans to this day as Derek Malcolm, a former film critic of the Guardian who as a teenager actually met them on their tour of the UK, recently admitted:

“As someone who met Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Satyajit Ray, Howard Hawks, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin and many others in the course of a long stint as the Guardian’s film critic, I am often asked who was my favourite movie star. The answer is none of them. My favourites are Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Mind you, I was in my mid-teens when I met them, which probably led to the kind of adolescent hero worship I might later have abjured.”

The screenplay is by Jeff Pope who had previously co-written the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Philomena (2013) with Steve Coogan. His previous work for television includes screenplays for Mrs Briggs (2012), Lucan (2013) and Cilla (2014). Jon S Baird has had a varied career as director where his work includes Filth (2013), based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, and episodes of the series Babylon (2014) and Vinyl (2016) which included Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger as executive producers.

Here's the trailer:

Red Joan

Over the years we have been running any film starring Judi Dench has always been popular, and so it proved with Red Joan. The reviews had not been brilliant but it was an enjoyable film with some excellent performances, and it was good to see a story about Cambridge spies that did not overtly refer to Burgess and Maclean.

Red Joan

UK 2018          101 minutes

Director:          Trevor Nunn

Starring:            Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Tom Hughes

“This 40s period piece tootles picturesquely along like a cold war, heterosexual version of The Imitation Game, the biopic of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. There is the same prestige Britpic furniture: clipped vowels, kindly officer-class boffins, sexy smoulderers, brilliant women patronised by pipe-smoking, pint-quaffing chaps, illicit (straight) relationships in cramped rooms with a sixpence for the meter.”

Peter Bradshaw

The peaceful retirement of Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is disrupted when she is taken into custody after MI5 discover that in the past she provided intelligence to the KGB. In 1938 a young Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) is studying physics at Cambridge where she falls for a young communist called Leo Galich (Tom Hughes). After graduating Joan is offered a job at a weapons research facility and as the nuclear arms race accelerates she has to decide what she would do to secure peace in the world.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney which was inspired by the life of Melita Norwood, a member of the Woolwich Spy Ring, who supplied nuclear secrets to the USSR while working for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association and thus helped the Soviet development of nuclear weapon technology. In reality Norwood spent a year studying Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton rather than physics at Cambridge, but the change makes a notional link with the Cambridge Spy Ring that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

Trevor Nunn has had a long career in the theatre where he has served as Artistic Director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre as well as directing a series of globally successful musicals such as Cats and Les Miserables. He has also worked in television and to a lesser extent in cinema, although most of his work for television has been to produce screen versions of his own successful stage productions. For the cinema prior to Red Joan he has directed only three films in over more than 40 years: Hedda (1975) with Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler; Lady Jane (1986) which gave an early starring role to Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Jane Grey; and Twelfth Night (1996) which starred Imogen Stubbs, Nunn’s then wife, and Helena Bonham Carter in leading roles.

Here's the trailer:

Fisherman's Friends

We started our current season last September but in the light of the Coronavirus Pandemic we decided to can what remains of our programme. I write notes for every film we screen and some people even read them. For the sake of completeness I'll post them all over the next few weeks as I currently have no plans to go anywhere.

I'd not seen this film at the cinema, but it was quite fun: certainly a good way to bring an audience back to our film club after the summer break.

Fisherman’s Friends

UK 2019          112 minutes

Director:          Chris Foggin

Starring:            James Purefoy, Daniel Mays, Noel Clarke and Tuppence Middleton

“Fisherman's Friends is a formulaic but thoroughly amiable and upbeat British comedy with a flavour of Ealing Studios and The Full Monty about it. The plot which the screenwriters have cooked up seems almost an afterthought. The singing fishermen came first. The Fisherman’s Friends really were signed by a major record label, had a top 10 hit, and turned into a full-blown media sensation. The film takes considerable liberties with their story, but fans of extra mature Cornish cheddar won’t be complaining.”

Geoffrey McNab

While visiting a Cornish village on a stag weekend Danny (Daniel Mays) a London music executive is tricked buy his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of local fishermen who sign sea shanties. As he struggles to gain the respect and enthusiasm of the group he is drawn deeper into their traditional way of life and this makes him re-evaluate his own integrity and what success actually means.

The film declares that it is “based on a true story”, but the reality is that Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the writers and producers of the film, saw the group Fisherman’s Friends performing on TV, optioned their life rights and then created their own story. The real life story of the group is more mundane: radio presenter Johnnie Walker bought two of the group’s homemade CDs while on holiday in Cornwall and then his manager travelled to Port Isaac to meet them and then negotiated a recording contract worth £1 million for them. A very different view of the contemporary Cornish fishing industry can be seen in Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019), which Peter Bradshaw described as “an episode of EastEnders directed by F W Murnau” and which Mark Kermode has hailed as one of the defining British films of the decade.

Nick Moorcroft has written a number of successful British comedy films including St Trinian’s (2007) and St Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009,) and more recently the romantic comedy Finding Your Feet (2017). Chris Foggin has worked on a films as diverse as My Week with Marilyn (2011), The Iron Lady (2011) and Effie Grey (2014) as an Assistant Director as well as performing a similar role in a number of high profile television programmes, but this is his first feature film as director.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Green Book

We chose to screen this as our AGM. I'd missed it at the cinema and was keen to see it as in terms of awards it had proved to be a bit of a sleeper. Having seen it I can report that I enjoyed it, but felt that there were other films that were more deserving of the Oscars for Best Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Here are my notes:

Green Book

USA 2019        130 minutes

Director:          Peter Farrelly

Starring:            Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali and Linda Cardellini

“It’s easy to discount the simplicity of Green Book in a way that many similarly and unfairly did when Hidden Figures broke out in 2016, sighing at the broad strokes used to tell a vital true story. But there’s a necessity in using a film of this scale to recreate a time not too long ago when black people were being regularly dehumanised and devalued in ways that were upheld by the law. Yes, this is entertainment pitched at a wide audience and is constructed in the most easily digestible way possible but it still serves a significant purpose to remind white audiences of the difficulties faced by those of colour.”

Benjamin Lee

Award and Nominations:

• Won Oscars for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) plus Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen) and Best Editing
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) plus nominations for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)
• A further 49 wins and 85 nominations

In 1962 the African American classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) toured the Deep South of the USA with Italian American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) as his bodyguard and driver. In view of the segregation and discrimination policies still in force at that time the pair use The Negro Motorist Green Book which details services and places relatively friendly to African Americans.

The screenplay for the film is co-written by Nick Vallelonga, son of Frank Vallelonga and is based on his interviews with his father and Shirley as well as letters that his father wrote to his mother. Nick Vallelonga did not speak to surviving members of Shirley’s family who were critical of Shirley’s portrayal in the film although Shirley himself had told him not to speak to members of his family and had himself approved both what Vallelonga included and excluded in terms of his life. Similarly some critics had an issue with the film’s depiction of race in that it seemed to propose a “white saviour” narrative, although director Peter Farrelly countered this by explaining that the film was:

"about two guys who were complete opposites and found a common ground, and it's not one guy saving the other. It's both saving each other and pulling each other into some place where they could bond and form a lifetime friendship.

In real life Vallelonga and Shirley remained friends until they both died within months of each other in 2013.

Director Peter Farrelly made his name by working with his brother Bobby to direct quirky comedies such as Dumb and Dumber (1994), There’s Something About Mary (1998), Me, Myself and Irene (2000) and Shallow Hal (2001). In addition to the films he has co-directed for cinema he has also written extensively for television and published two novels.

Green Book was initially given a limited release in the USA but following its Oscar nominations and other success during the awards season it was given a far wider screening which led into a significant increase in it takings, although Farrelly himself did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. The film was also a surprise hit in China where its takings meant that it was the second highest grossing Oscar winner for best film after Titanic (1997). It was also recognised as one of the top ten films of the year by the American Film Institute.

Here is the trailer:

Bohemian Rhapsody

I'd read the bad reviews about this film and then I'd seen the numerous awards that it picked up - mostly by Rami Malek for his performance - so I was genuinely interested finally to see it.

I enjoyed it, but thought  that it offered a sanitised version of Freddie Mercury's life: it would take someone with the talent of Derek Jarman even to come close to a more authentic version, although I don't think that such a film would have received the approval of the rest of Queen let alone the finance needed to produce it.

Bohemian Rhapsody

USA 2018        134 minutes

Director:          Bryan Singer

Starring:            Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy

“We can stipulate a few things about Bohemian Rhapsody. We can stipulate that it’s not a great movie. We can stipulate that, in many ways, it’s not even a very good movie. As a trite, often laughably clichéd biopic of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, an enterprise that should have been as daring and flamboyantly theatrical as its subject winds up being bowdlerized, Wiki-fied, distortingly compressed and unforgivably conventional.

And yet.

We can also stipulate that, despite the myriad shortcomings of its parts, the sum of Bohemian Rhapsody winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.”

Anne Hornaday, Washington Post

Award and Nominations:

• Won four Oscars including Best Actor (Rami Malek)
• Won two BAFTAs including Best Actor (Rami Malek) plus five other nominations
• A further 27 wins and 56 nominations

In London in the early 1970s aspiring musician Farrokh Bulsara (Rami Malek) learns that the lead singer of a band called Smile has left and so he auditions to take on the role: subsequently Bulsara changes his name to Freddie Mercury, the band renames itself Queen and the group begins its rise to global success. In the 1980s Freddie Mercury leaves the band to work on solo albums, but they reunite to perform triumphantly at the 1985 Live Aid concert. Prior to their performance Mercury reveals to his bandmates that he has contracted the HIV virus and intertitles at the end of the film state that he died from AIDs-related pneumonia in 1994.

Brain May and Roger Taylor were both co-producers of the film which had a long and complex production history involving, among other issues, a struggle over whether the film should focus on the story of the band or should be a more adult story focused on the life on Mercury. Initially both Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Whishaw had been linked to the role of Mercury with Dexter Fletcher (whose previous work as director includes the musical Sunshine on Leith (2013) and the comedy Eddie the Eagle (2016)) to direct from a screenplay by Peter Morgan. In November 2015 Anthony McCarten, who had written the screenplays for both The Theory of Everything (2014) and Darkest Hour (2017), was commissioned to produce a new screenplay from Morgan’s outline and the film finally went into production in 2016. In addition to the complexities of its production history the film’s screenplay generated some controversy as a result of its depiction of some key events in the history of Queen in the wrong order, especially Mercury’s HIV diagnosis: it is generally accepted that he discovered that he had been infected between late 1986 and Spring 1987, and in reality he did not make the other band members aware of this until late in 1989.

Bryan Singer is credited as the film’s director although he was fired from the production with less than two weeks of principal photography left. Dexter Fletcher was recalled by the producers to finish the photography and complete the film although the credits list only Singer as director, with Fletcher’s role being relegated to that of Executive Producer. Fletcher is currently working on Rocketman, a biography of Elton John which has the tagline of being “based on a true fantasy”, a statement which hopefully will ensure that it escapes criticism for any elements that do not reflect the historical record.

Here is the trailer:

Some Like It Hot

Each season we aim to include one "classic" film that has a significant anniversary, and this year we selected Some Like It Hot: it was a unanimous decision.

I'd actually seen the film on a big screen once before where it reinforced my belief that you do not really appreciate a film until you see it on a big screen. It was good to have this opportunity to re-acquaint myself with this true classic.

Some Like It Hot

USA 1959        116 minutes

Director:          Billy Wilder

Starring:            Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon

Award and Nominations:

• Five Oscar nominations including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon) Best Director, Best Cinematography (Black and White) and one Oscar win (Best Costume Design, Black and White)
• BAFTA award for Best Foreign Actor (Jack Lemmon)
• A further eight wins and eight nominations

“Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. ‘Nobody’s perfect’ is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are musicians in Chicago, and when they accidentally witness a gangland killing they board a train bound for Florida disguised as Josephine and Daphne, the most recent recruits of an all-girl jazz band. Their cover is perfect until Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) falls for Josephine and an elderly playboy (Joe E Brown) takes a shine to Daphne.

The idea of two men disguising themselves as women to join an all-girl band was borrowed from a 1951 German film called Fanfares of Love (Fanfaren der Liebe) which itself was a remake of a 1935 French comedy called Fanfare of Love (Fanfare d’amour). However Billy Wilder and his co-screenplay writer I A L Diamond had the inspired idea to add a gangster subplot to the main story both as motivation to keep the musicians on the run as well as allowing themselves as filmmakers to make witty references back to Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s. On its re-release in 2014 Peter Bradshaw hailed the film as “the best remake in movie history” and the screenplay received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The casting of the main roles is superb and from the perspective of today it is difficult now to imagine other actors in the roles, but at one time Wilder had hoped to cast Frank Sinatra in the film and earlier on had even thought about a double act of Bob Hope and Danny Kay. Additionally with Marilyn Monroe in great personal distress during the making of the film Wilder had Mitzi Gaynor on standby to take over the role, but without Monroe the chemistry of the central roles would have worked nowhere near as well.

The film opened to positive reviews, with eminent critic Dilys Powell praising all the performances and also commenting on the transgressive subject matter, describing it as “a farce blacker than is common on the American screen [that] whistles along at a smart, murderous pace”. The film subsequently received six Oscar nominations (and won one) and since then has never fallen out of favour with either the public or critics. In 2000 the American Film Institute selected it as the top comedy in its 100 Years… 100 Laughs poll, a BBC poll of 253 films critics in 2017 chose it as the best comedy of all time and in 2005 the BFI included the film in its list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.

In recent times it has been possible to identify the transgressive nature of the story more clearly. In Have You Seen, his epic introduction to 1000 films, eminent film historian David Thomson highlights this new perspective:

“I suspect, literally, that no one knew that the film was a gay breakthrough. If they had guessed, they would have taken fright. But here is another film from the late fifties that blows up every convention it can see and discloses miracles in the explosion. Everybody’s perfect.”

The overwhelming and ongoing success of Some Like It Hot is considered to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the Hays Code which since 1930 had defined what was acceptable content for films produced in the USA, although the code itself was finally abandoned only in 1968, a year which saw the release of films as diverse as The Producers, Rosemary’s Baby and Barbarella.

Here is a link to the trailer: